Staying Organized with Wunderlist

Last summer, I sought out a simple task manager application to replace my handwritten to-do lists and haphazardly flagged Outlook tasks. I wanted a well-designed list making tool with checkboxes; one that I could update from anywhere; and that would require little effort to learn.

A colleague suggested I try Wunderlist, a free task manager application that syncs your to-do lists to the cloud and is available on a wide variety of devices: iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, PC & Mac, and online in any browser. For a more thorough overview of Wunderlist’s features, see:

Here are a few ways the app has helped me to stay organized, both at work and at home.

Work To-Do Lists

At the Library, I use Wunderlist to organize my individual to-dos by project and by deadline. I don’t use a tablet or laptop at work, so in most cases I enter new tasks on wunderlist.com while reading emails or immediately following meetings. If I miss a deadline, Wunderlist will send me a reminder by email.

If I want to share a particular list with a colleague, I can click “share with cloud app” to generate a unique URL, which can then be emailed or IM’d to my coworker. This allows the recipient to view my task list but not to make changes to it.

Collaborative Projects

For projects that require one or more collaborators, I can easily share a task list with others.

This allows my colleagues to edit our shared list and mark off completed tasks on their device of choice.

Shopping Lists

Wunderlist works really well for this purpose. It’s very convenient to type up a grocery list from my home computer, access the list from my phone at the grocery store, and then check off the items as I buy them. (I tried using Google Tasks and Evernote for this purpose, and they didn’t work nearly as well.)

Members of the same household could make use of the shared feature (detailed above) to avoid buying duplicate items at the store, running errands, etc.

Suggestion for improvement: it would be great to be able to save a specific grocery list or recipe, check the items off as you buy them, and easily repopulate the list the next time you want to buy those same ingredients.

I was intrigued by LifeTopix so I took a look at http://lightarrow.com/lifetopix.
I’m very impressed that you adopted this app to organize all your stuff and are finding it a big time-saver…as promised by the app description. I’m a little daunted by the thought of consolidating all my silos, but it definitely has appeal! I’ll think about taking the plunge…

For shopping lists, I really like OurGroceries. You can maintain lists for different stores, repopulate the lists with items you’ve purchased before, and save ingredients for specific recipes. It’s easy to add those ingredients to your shopping list when you want to make the recipe. You can also share lists with other members of your household. It works great for other kinds of simple to-do lists, as well.